March 11, 2024

Morning Joe continues to point out Trump's increasingly authoritarian statements.

"That's what America looks like under Donald Trump's second term if we take them at his own words, right?" Mika said.

"I thought that line about, 'He's not controversial because he says what he wants and gets it done. He's the boss,' was so reflective," Scarborough said.

"Projection, confession. You know, that was confession of what Donald Trump would like. Viktor Orban is proud of the fact he's made Hungary what he calls an illiberal democracy. I'm not sure whether those two things can be possible together. How do you have a democracy that is illiberal? That goes against the strain of democracy.

"Anyway, that's what he's done by packing the courts with his cronies, weighing in on judicial cases, by making it incredibly difficult for journalists to do any kind of independent reporting. they are told by their editors what facts they can report before they actually are allowed to write their articles. That's the kind of state that Donald Trump down there in Mar-A-Lago in that speech seems to be admiring. It is also the state, you know, Tucker Carlson went to Viktor Orban to kind of pay homage to his leadership.

"There is a strain there in the MAGA movement that clearly admires those illiberal democracies, autocratic-leaning countries. It's tied up with Russia. The EU had to lean very heavily on Viktor Orban, basically threatening him with other punishments if he didn't go ahead and agree to an EU package of aid to Ukraine, paused because he didn't want to. He didn't want to get in the way of something with Vladimir Putin. It's a circular movement to what Donald Trump is doing in Mar-A-Lago, Tucker Carlson's visit to Moscow, and Viktor Orban's relationship with Vladimir Putin," Scarborough said.

"You have in Donald Trump a guy who said he's going to terminate the Constitution. He's going to be a dictator on Day One. He would like to execute generals for not being lackeys, for treason. Said he could use SEAL Team Six to execute his political opponents and not be arrested. And you go through all of this long list.

"Even in his presidency, the last two weeks, he said he wanted to -- he was demanding that his attorney general arrest Joe Biden and Joe Biden's family because he was behind in the polls. Said he should send him to jail. You have all this happening. We talked about the young Republicans who, unfortunately, have had their bearings, like, twisted by this. To become unrecognizable. And you look at -- I saw Vaughn Hillyard interviewing people at Trump rallies, talking about civil war, saying that if they didn't win this time, they were going to use violence. They were going to take over state legislatures. They were going to take over courts. They were going to come to washington. They were going to take over Washington. Charlie Sykes, this is not a test run. This is a guy that's told his followers, 'If I win, I'm going to be a dictator,' and his followers are all in. Again, Charlie, how perverse, that it is people I went to church with, evangelicals, a lot of them that seem to be swept up into this totalitarianism, this authoritarianism, and also small government Republicans, Tea Party types that wanted small government. They're now begging for an autocrat, for a tyrant, for a dictator.

"They just all fall in line," Charlie Sykes said. "It's sad, and it's pathetic. They're all going to lose. It's just like, Trump is going to lose again. For some reason, they can't pull out of this political death spiral."

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